Competitive Advantage
How does your training team give your organization a competitive advantage? You should be able to answer this we ease as training should be a strategic lever in executing on goals. Many organizations put a heavy emphasis on purchasing top tier talent, and not really enforcing the development of that talent, which means it grows stale if they aren’t continuing development or it becomes overly expensive to sustain.
What should you expect your training team to do to give your organization a competitive advantage? In some ways this depends on your strategies within your industry, but mostly, this is a static concept across most industries. Training teams mostly establish a competitive advantage by: (1) establishing speed to market; (2) Reinforcing successful behaviors through skill application; and (3) replicating the process expeditiously, effectively, and seamlessly.
We were working with an organization a handful of years ago to help them identify how they could create more agility in their organization while onboarding new systems. They were using a change management process and had a solid plan in place; however, there wasn’t anything that aligned with skill changes to modify behaviors, rather it was a transaction approach to change to a new system. Agility requires a new behavior.
We worked with this group to first identify deadlines and how to prep and scale from there. An agile workforce handles change better than a change management plan. So we established an aggressive timeline for introducing knowledge and concepts that needed to be prepped before training behaviors and the new functions the teams were going to do. This was our first measure of speed to market. We needed this to be a process so it could be replicated in all future changes.
We then created a skills lab where the team specifically focused on applying agility skills and change skills along with the basic functions in place. This skill was measured so we could determine their ability to adopt change. Our ability to equip people with skills to adopt new changes became the second speed to market. These two pieces become key levers that the organization was able to pull when driving change. Rather than ramping up the change management plan each time, the staff was better able to drive the change and we measured how fast we could do that. It was replicated multiple times with consistency, which created better market positioning and sped up the adoption of processes to meet evolving customer demands.
Speed to market should be calculated on two fronts. First, determine speed of building content for both rote and skills prep. This measure is designed to separate and optimize internal training ability to diagnose an opportunity, establish a solution and build the solution to train. The second speed to market should be measured between the distance of training to skill proficiency. The purpose of this second measure is to isolate the process and practice of transferring new knowledge to the actual practice.
Collectively, these measure help the training team better leverage their own processes and align their output with the organizational needs at a rate that better allows for change and implementation of process, technology, or laws.
After speed to market, it’s important to understand skill application. Training doesn’t do anything if people cannot transfer the new skill into action in their role. Trends towards building e-learning content are often lacking in how they reinforce this exercise. Best practices are to leverage e-learning as an introduction to the changes or content, and to set up the learner for success when drilling their skills. Skills should be delivered through repetition of the exercises, applied in real case scenarios, and even explored through on the job scenarios. This is consistent with adult learning theory.
When we were establishing agility with our client, we put an emphasis on the process itself with the skill as the outcome. This helped the people understand, not only what agility means and how to apply it, but how to learn skills in an effective way. This is important because the next emphasis of change will require that skill to help provide speed and accuracy to the needed changes.
To position your organization with competitive advantage in skills means to really understand the market, what great execution looks like, and the full process to deliver consistent results. The learners should then dedicate intentional time to mastering the exercise in one setting. Measures shouldn’t really be focused so much on their content knowledge in this case, rather, quality assurance and peers should be examining the demonstration of knowledge. This allows for on the job coaching and a better view of gaps in the training process all together.
This measure is best reported as effectiveness in demonstrating the skills in a real environment and the speed at which they are able to demonstrate the new knowledge. Less errors and faster application become leading indicators to the businesses quality measures and their profit and loss margins.
Finally, the training team should be able to replicate their process with accuracy and consistency on a regular basis. This means the team should have a well defined process for how they conduct discovery for organizational needs, align with the strategies, and diagnose the need in the organization. Following the diagnostics, the team should have an intake process that covers what training, if any, is needed, and begin the needs analysis, projected outcomes, and build process.
This measure should be reported as an overview of the entire process examining standard turnaround times, standard deliveries in quality, and standard success rates for transferring knowledge. All of this is then benchmarked internally. When organizations begin projecting changes and implementing processes, the expectations of training become much more critical as this information is more readily available and part of the plan of execution.
The consistency at which teams can run their process without errors better positions an entire organization to execute changes, normal practices, and industry shifts with ease across the organization. Your organization should not settle for anything less than this approach when looking to establish competitive advantage. Too often, training teams are not supplying this and organizations are not expecting this. That changes when you examine the top performing organizations.